Her Tentacles 14

Chapter 14: Surgery

While Shu Yao was pretending to be busy at her desk, the red light of the emergency operating room at Nanshan Hospital was already on.

A worker, who had been notified to report to work despite the city-wide yellow typhoon warning, was unfortunately impaled in the head by a falling piece of rebar from a scaffold as he passed the hospital’s old, under-renovation warehouse this morning. He then fell into a manhole, its cover dislodged by last night’s accumulated rainwater.

Coincidentally, the fire station was right next door, and the head of Nanshan Hospital’s emergency department was still working overtime. And so, the rebar was cut, emergency care was administered, and the head of neurosurgery was consulted to confirm the imaging and proceed with surgery…

Now.

The patient had been brought to Lin Ran’s operating table.

The shadowless lamp illuminated the gruesome wound where the rebar had pierced him. The surgeon’s expression was calm.

“Scalpel.”

“Cranial drill.”

“Milling cutter.”

Scalp, muscle, bone flap, dura mater… The area around the wound was gradually exposed with the skilled cooperation of the surgical team. But just as the suction device was about to be used, the procedure came to an abrupt halt.

Beep—

The orderly sound of the ECG monitor was particularly piercing at this moment.

Beep, beep, beep…

With each beep, the gelatinous mass in the patient’s head pulsed, even faintly glowing with a ghostly green fluorescence, as if it were alive, breathing.

The area around the operating table fell silent. A nurse hesitantly asked, “Director Lin… what—what is this?”

Right before their eyes, beneath the patient’s opened bone flap, the brain tissue that should have been there had vanished. Even the blood had disappeared. Yet, the ECG monitor’s readings were all normal: heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, heart rhythm…

Even without looking, Lin Ran could feel the astonishment of her assistants.

Her dark eyes, visible above her surgical mask, remained calm. She turned her gloved palm up. “Scalpel.”

The first assistant turned to look at her in shock, then did as he was told. The next second, the short, cold, silver blade was precisely inserted into the center of the fluorescent green slime!

Someone gasped dramatically.

Because after the tip of the blade fell, the writhing, unidentified creature parted like the Red Sea, making way for the blade. Then it began to boil, as if waking from hibernation, and started to break apart. Countless snail-like tentacles extended and retracted, and small clumps of slime converged on the scalpel again.

The fluorescent green, jelly-like creature crawled up the scalpel.

Just as it was about to touch her gloved fingers—

“Director Lin!”

Amidst the panicked warning, the surgeon’s wrist flicked. The others only saw a flash of silver, and when they looked again, the fluorescent green mass had been pinned to the patient’s bed by the scalpel, at the side of his neck.

…

A dead silence enveloped the entire operating room.

Even the red glow of the electronic clock counting the duration of the surgery seemed ominous.

While the first and second assistants’ minds raced through the chapters of their parasitology textbooks, branching out to cutting-edge medical papers from Africa, South America, and even Antarctica, trying to find a picture that matched the patient’s condition, Lin Ran, the only one who had seen them change, her expression grew even colder.

Yes.

After Shu Yao had fallen asleep last night, she had left again, wanting to figure out why the things mixed in with the rain had given her such a strange sense of threat.

And then she had seen a sight that had made her exceptionally angry.

Pop.

A faint sound came from within the patient’s body, like a pea pod splitting open when ripe.

This sound was captured only by Lin Ran. She coldly lifted her eyelids, her anger unleashing a crushing pressure, bearing down on this group of poachers who dared to steal the livestock from her hunting grounds—

Sensing her emotions, the culprits, who had been lurking for a long time and had already hollowed out the human shell, immediately accelerated their pace of consumption. The fluorescent green slime poured out from the opening in the human’s head.

As they gushed out endlessly, the patient’s originally healthy body deflated like a leaky balloon. Flesh, bones, everything collapsed. Amidst the screams of the medical staff and the alarm of the ECG monitor as the heartbeat flatlined, the patient was left with only a thin layer of skin spread out on the bed. The slime became a flood, joyfully surging in all directions in the sealed operating room.

【Hee hee.】

【Hee hee, hee hee…】

They sent this message to the top predator who had already established her territory in Nancheng on a first-come, first-served basis.

—You’re courting death.

The response was the increasingly thick and robust chaotic black shadow that surrounded Lin Ran on the surgical wall.

“…Director Lin?”

“Director, are you okay?”

Eight hours later.

With the arrival of a special department at Nanshan Hospital, the related operating room was temporarily closed. The five medical staff who had fainted in the operating room were sent for examination one by one. Lin Ran, the only one who had walked out conscious, received special attention.

Not only did the special department personnel draw more than twenty tubes of her blood for testing, but she also had to undergo their questioning about every detail of the surgical process. During the process, a dedicated psychologist was ostensibly providing her with psychological support, but was in fact constantly observing her for any signs of lying.

Because in her account, after the unidentified creatures flowed out on the operating table, she had fainted along with her colleagues, but she had woken up earlier, and by the time she did, the creatures had disappeared.

After all this, when she finally returned to her office, her face was a little pale.

The doctors and nurses in her department, who didn’t know the full story, were both curious about the sealed-off operating room and concerned about her physical condition. They all came to visit her with apples.

Even the hospital director made a special trip.

“Little Lin, you… how are you feeling now?”

Lin Ran’s eyelids drooped listlessly.

【Disgusting.】

The wilted and nauseous voices of her tentacles were constantly making a fuss in her mind.

【Disgusting, disgusting, blech—】

【Yue…】

Her complexion worsened. She looked at the director without a word, her usual spring-breeze smile gone. On her cold face, her dark eyes were like deep pools in a cave, and even her long black hair, tucked behind her ear, looked like sticky black mud, as if it were about to release gloomy black bubbles at any moment.

The director took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He took a step back and glanced at the sky outside. “You… well, it hasn’t been easy for you today, with this incident. The typhoon is coming tonight. Why don’t you go home and rest for a couple of days?”

Lin Ran was already annoyed by the endless stream of people coming to her office to inquire. At his words, she stood up without hesitation and started to leave, but was called back by the director:

“…That, do you have any thoughts on the thing in that patient’s head?”

Lin Ran lowered her gaze in thought.

This time, she answered. “I want it dead.”

The director looked at her, speechless, for half a second. “I was asking if you have any guesses as to what that thing is—never mind, never mind, you can go home now.”

…

Lin Ran also wanted to know what that thing was.

In their two clashes last night and today, she had discovered that the thing seemed to counter her abilities, rendering her lethal hunting toxin ineffective. Because they multiplied too quickly, her toxin could only deal with a small number of targets, while they acted in groups.

And to make matters worse, they were so disgusting.

Although they used humans as nutrients, digesting their flesh and blood, they did not become delicious as a result.

Lin Ran’s mood at this moment was like discovering that her house walls were infested with termites, gnawing away at the cement and rebar, and the furniture was already ruined. The imminent collapse of the building awaited her.

So annoying.

So, so, so annoying—

“Verification successful.”

Someone at the entryway said, “I’m back,” to the room, followed by the slapping sound of slippers coming toward the living room. Then the footsteps paused in front of her.

“Lin Ran?”

The person, with her small braid and light green long dress, her expression changing from the surprise of a blooming spring flower to the desolate despair of a wilting autumn leaf, opened her mouth for a long time, then her knees gave way, and she collapsed to the floor. “The typhoon… is already here?”

“?”

The person whose thoughts had been interrupted followed her gaze and scanned the surroundings.

In front of the wide-open living room window, through which the wind was howling, the irregular crystal vase with a small yellow flower on the coffee table was overturned. The shelf with the beautiful miniature succulent worlds was in disarray, with the succulents and gravel scattered on the floor. Only the empty round glass spheres were rolling on the ground. Even the pretty bowls and plates that were originally on the dining table and the kitchen rack were now also in the living room.

And in Lin Ran’s field of vision, in the water bottles, glass spheres, and bowls and plates, were her transparent tentacles, which had instantly entered mimicry mode and were now frozen in place because their master had returned.

Lin Ran, who had been so engrossed in her thoughts that she hadn’t noticed their movements at all: “…!”

“Uh…” Lin Ran pondered for less than half a second, then resolutely blamed it all on the typhoon. “Yes, just now, as I was about to close the window—”

Plop, plop. Before she could finish, she heard the sound of water droplets hitting the tiled floor.

And before her eyes, on Shu Yao’s beautiful face, her light brown eyes were filled with mist, and her whole person seemed about to shatter.

Lin Ran, again: “!!”